


New Year's Day

by thedevilchicken



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Culture, F/M, Ritual Sex, Traditions, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 04:59:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19434427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Now she's left Naboo, Padmé still tries to celebrate traditionally.





	New Year's Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_ringed_octopus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_ringed_octopus/gifts).



They're not the only two Naboo on Coruscant, but the others she knows by name are all members of her staff or priests at the temple. Bringing in the new year with them really wouldn't be appropriate, according to all their rules and tradition, and she'd feel awkward asking them about it even if that weren't true. And so, each year, she has very little choice but to celebrate with Palpatine.

The water festival takes place at the start of each new year, when the rivers on Naboo rise up close to bursting their banks. Sometimes they do, but they're prepared for that; in Theed, there's a network of gates that they open up one by one, bleeding off water from the Solleu and out into the plains outside. The silt it deposits helps their crops grow later in the year, and they're thankful for that. Naboo is a world of water; all life there springs from it. That's why their new year starts the way it does.

When the festival comes, people fly blue and green and gray streamers from the windows of heir houses so they flutter in the new year winds, and they tie colored ribbons in their hair, and they smile and dance and laugh. It's a happy time. They make a special stew from river plants and make a special bread to dip in it that they bake inside thick lake plant leaves, and for the first three days all they're meant to drink is rainwater they've caught and filtered. After that, they bring out bottles of waterwine that they dip their cakes in. Before Padmé Naberrie became Padmé Amidala, when she was still a child and not the woman she is now, it used to be her favorite time of year. 

Padmé remembers all the dresses she wore for the festival's opening ceremony each year after she'd been elected queen, all flowing gowns and headdresses made to resemble the flow of rivers and waves and waterfalls. She remembers her handmaidens helping her to put them on, standing still with her arms spread wide as they fastened her in. She remembers the first one, the opalescent blue-green crepe that shimmered with tiny crystal beads like the spray of the Solleu waterfalls past the royal palace - it was heavy, so heavy that even walking to her transport felt very nearly impossible, never mind down the temple steps. Then she remembers them helping her take it off again. She remembers how much lighter she felt without it. 

She remembers stepping down into the water in the temple's royal chamber, out of sight. She remembers him waiting. She remembers his eyes on her. The way he looks at her has never changed in all these years. 

The water temple on Naboo is huge, though you'd never be able to tell it from its unimpressive presence above ground. Its entrance is through an arch by the river and a long staircase leads down into the bedrock from there, spiralling lower and lower, turning damp circles around a vertical shaft where water from the river pours in and roars down almost deafeningly. The festival's most ancient component is celebrated on the temple's lowest level, where small chambers are carved out of the rock to either side of a long, looping corridor that forms a not quite perfect circle. Stepped basins are carved down inside them, into which warm water pours in a continual stream, sweeping in and flowing out. 

Couples enter. She remembers the first time, and how nervous she was, and how happy she was, and how the beads on her dress chimed against the damp stone floor as she went into the room. He was waiting there, seated, and he politely averted his gaze as her handmaidens undressed her. They took the dress away and she heard its beads ringing together till the sound faded out beneath the rush of running water. 

It had taken her time to get used to her handmaidens seeing her without her clothes; she definitely wasn't used to anyone else seeing her that way. When he raised his gaze once they were alone, she really couldn't help it even though she knew tradition - she felt her cheeks flush hotly. She was pleased that she could finally participate fully in the festival but when he took off his robe and bared his skin just like she just had, she felt a lot less like a queen and a lot more like a naive fifteen-year-old. 

The water temple on Coruscant has only three chambers for the water festival, and they're nothing like they are back home on Naboo. The entrance is not an ornate stone archway carved to resemble a waterfall; it's an opaque plasteel frontage leading into an area that looks like a mid-range spa, with showers of tepid recycled water instead of warm and filtered from the river. She hates how being there made her feel. Last year, they went together. This year, now he's chancellor, they've arranged to meet in his quarters instead. She's grateful for that, at least, but it's completely different in another way again. 

They're alone in his apartment, in the 'fresher, where he has a large, tiled bathtub. His bodyguards are in the corridor outside but they don't know why she's here; she wishes they did, because it wouldn't seem so sordid as it does now. When she was Queen of Naboo and he was her senator, he came back every year for the celebration and they met in the temple with all the other celebrants, where everybody understood tradition, and now she's just a senator and he's the Republic's Supreme Chancellor, neither of them can afford the time away from the senate to go home. At least the priests in their three-chamber temple understood what they were doing, even if she hated to feel their eyes on her. She used to see all the other couples together on her way out of the temple in Theed, skin on skin in the water, and be glad that no one else could see her. Now she almost wishes they could.

Alone, when he puts his hands on her, it doesn't feel like they're just welcoming in the new year. It doesn't feel like centuries-old tradition. When he puts his hands on her, when he washes her, when his fingers slip between her thighs, when he sits and she straddles his lap and he enters her, this is not worship. At least not worship the way they do it back in Theed. 

When they're done, she'll dry herself and dress and they'll sit in his study and drink a cup of wine that's mixed with rainwater sent there from Naboo, and maybe that will feel different. They'll have dinner - stew and leaf-baked bread - and then she'll leave and go back to her own apartment. But for now, Palpatine swallows and bites his lip as he touches her. 

Tonight, she's his lover, and she should be ashamed of that. But honestly, somehow, she finds she doesn't mind at all.


End file.
